Word: busches
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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While Gussie scrubbed vats, his father tried to hold the company together and fought for survival and repeal. Anheuser-Busch turned from beer to a variety of other products: yeast, refrigeration cabinets, bus and truck bodies, corn and malt syrup, and a variety of soft drinks, including a chocolate soft drink named Carcho. The losses were staggering. Nevertheless, the company stayed in business. Young Gussie used the time to climb through the ranks. By 1924 he was brewery superintendent; in 1926 he was named general manager and sixth vice president; eight years later, when Prohibition was finally repealed...
...Brewer Busch vividly remembers the night of April 7, 1933. "The crowds were singing and having a wonderful time," he recalls, "and at midnight every factory in St. Louis blew its whistle. Then the trucks rolled out of the gates and took Budweiser to bars all over St. Louis. People were backed all the way out to the curb waiting for their turn at the bar." Gussie, his father and his older brother picked one of the first cases off the bottling-plant line and sent it air express to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a heartfelt token of thanks...
Though the fight was won, it had taken too much out of Gus's father. Suffering from high blood pressure, gout and a bad heart, August Busch Sr. shot himself to death on Feb. 13, 1934. In accordance with family tradition, Gussie's older brother Adolphus III was elected president, and from 1937 to 1945 he kept the company at the top of the industry. Gussie Busch went off to World War II in 1942, spent most of his time helping to break tank-production bottlenecks at Detroit's automotive center, came...
...Leaders. During the war, when demand soared way above production, Anheuser-Busch's sales division had become lazy. With peace and competition, Milwaukee's hustling brewers shot ahead. By the end of 1946, Pabst was on top, though only by a bare 20,000 bbls. Busch was stunned. The next year he pushed sales and production up to 3,608,738 bbls. But still Anheuser-Busch skidded into fourth place. A new leader, Schlitz, took over and kept on top for six straight years...
From 1947 to 1952 Busch rode his company as if it were a balky jumper, forced it over hurdle after hurdle. Overruling his conservative directors, Busch kicked off a $50 million expansion program for the St. Louis brewery to boost capacity 2,630,000 bbls. to 6,230,000 annually, rammed through a $34 million project for an East Coast brewery at Newark, another $25 million for the West Coast brewery. Production rose enough to put Anheuser-Busch in second place, right on the heels of Schlitz. Then, in 1953, Budweiser broke through. With the new Newark brewery capable...